Posts Tagged ‘search query’

Silyl cations?

Thursday, March 23rd, 2017

It is not only the non-classical norbornyl cation that has proved controversial in the past. A colleague mentioned at lunch (thanks Paul!) that tri-coordinate group 14 cations such as R3Si+ have also had an interesting history.[1] Here I take a brief look at some of these systems.

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References

  1. J.B. Lambert, Y. Zhao, H. Wu, W.C. Tse, and B. Kuhlmann, "The Allyl Leaving Group Approach to Tricoordinate Silyl, Germyl, and Stannyl Cations", Journal of the American Chemical Society, vol. 121, pp. 5001-5008, 1999. http://dx.doi.org/10.1021/ja990389u

Stable “unstable” molecules: a crystallographic survey of cyclobutadienes and cyclo-octatetraenes.

Sunday, March 5th, 2017

Cyclobutadiene is one of those small iconic molecules, the transience and instability of which was explained theoretically long before it was actually detected in 1965.[1] Given that instability, I was intrigued as to how many crystal structures might have been reported for this ring system, along with the rather more stable congener cyclo-octatetraene. Here is what I found.

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References

  1. L. Watts, J.D. Fitzpatrick, and R. Pettit, "Cyclobutadiene", Journal of the American Chemical Society, vol. 87, pp. 3253-3254, 1965. http://dx.doi.org/10.1021/ja01092a049

Molecules of the year? Pnictogen chains and 16 coordinate Cs.

Monday, December 19th, 2016

I am completing my survey of the vote for molecule of the year candidates, which this year seems focused on chemical records of one type or another.

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Molecule of the year? “CrN123”, a molecule with three different types of Cr-N bond.

Friday, December 16th, 2016

Here is a third candidate for the C&EN “molecule of the year” vote. This one was shortlisted because it is the first example of a metal-nitrogen complex exhibiting single, double and triple bonds from different nitrogens to the same metal[1] (XUZLUB has a 3D display available at DOI: 10.5517/CC1JYY6M). Since no calculation of its molecular properties was reported, I annotate some here.

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References

  1. E.P. Beaumier, B.S. Billow, A.K. Singh, S.M. Biros, and A.L. Odom, "A complex with nitrogen single, double, and triple bonds to the same chromium atom: synthesis, structure, and reactivity", Chemical Science, vol. 7, pp. 2532-2536, 2016. http://dx.doi.org/10.1039/c5sc04608d

Long C=C bonds.

Thursday, December 1st, 2016

Following on from a search for long C-C bonds, here is the same repeated for C=C double bonds.

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Long C-C bonds.

Wednesday, November 30th, 2016

In an earlier post, I searched for small C-C-C angles, finding one example that was also accompanied by an apparently exceptionally long C-C bond (2.18Å). But this arose from highly unusual bonding giving rise not to a single bond order but one closer to one half! How long can a “normal” (i.e single) C-C bond get, a question which has long fascinated chemists.

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Exploring the electrophilic directing influence of heteroaromatic rings using crystal structure data mining.

Tuesday, June 21st, 2016

This is a follow-up to the post on exploring the directing influence of (electron donating) substituents on benzene[1] with the focus on heteroaromatic rings such indoles, pyrroles and group 16 analogues (furans, thiophenes etc).

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References

  1. H.S. Rzepa, "Discovering More Chemical Concepts from 3D Chemical Information Searches of Crystal Structure Databases", Journal of Chemical Education, vol. 93, pp. 550-554, 2015. http://dx.doi.org/10.1021/acs.jchemed.5b00346

A wider look at π-complex metal-alkene (and alkyne) compounds.

Monday, June 13th, 2016

Previously, I looked at the historic origins of the so-called π-complex theory of metal-alkene complexes. Here I follow this up with some data mining of the crystal structure database for such structures.

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The mechanism of silylether deprotection using a tetra-alkyl ammonium fluoride.

Wednesday, May 25th, 2016

The substitution of a nucleofuge (a good leaving group) by a nucleophile at a carbon centre occurs with inversion of configuration at the carbon, the mechanism being known by the term SN2 (a story I have also told in this post). Such displacement at silicon famously proceeds by a quite different mechanism, which I here quantify with some calculations.

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What is the approach trajectory of enhanced (super?) nucleophiles towards a carbonyl group?

Wednesday, May 11th, 2016

I have previously commented on the Bürgi–Dunitz angle, this being the preferred approach trajectory of a nucleophile towards the electrophilic carbon of a carbonyl group. Some special types of nucleophile such as hydrazines (R2N-NR2) are supposed to have enhanced reactivity[1] due to what might be described as buttressing of adjacent lone pairs. Here I focus in on how this might manifest by performing searches of the Cambridge structural database for intermolecular (non-bonded) interactions between X-Y nucleophiles (X,Y= N,O,S) and carbonyl compounds OC(NM)2.

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References

  1. G. Klopman, K. Tsuda, J. Louis, and R. Davis, "Supernucleophiles—I", Tetrahedron, vol. 26, pp. 4549-4554, 1970. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S0040-4020(01)93101-1